Blurred Vision: Challenges in Credit Union Research and Modeling

George A. Overstreet, Jr. and Geoffrey M. Rubin, University of Virginia

This monograph serves as an introduction to academic work on credit unions. Credit unions have been under-researched despite their growing role in the U.S. financial system. Now they face a rapidly changing, highly competitive environment, thus creating a compelling need for additional research.

The authors illustrate how academic research is an ongoing process of testing ideas and generating controversy that leads to new and refined perspectives on key issues. They also provide an overview of credit union research for other researchers, show how credit unions as not-for-profit, mutual organizations do not fit easily into standard models of the profit-maximizing shareholder-owned firm, and point out problems encountered in drawing practical conclusions about credit unions from existing theory.